Resumen: En este artículo se presentan los resultados iniciales del análisis del fenómeno del habla ascendente registrada en enunciados en foco amplio en seis hablantes monolingües de español y seis hablantes nativos de mapudungun con manejo funcional de español de la IX Región. Se analizaron acústicamente los fragmentos entonativos de los primeros cinco minutos de conversación de los hablantes bilingües para describir las alturas tonales de las sílabas nucleares y postnucleares. Estos se compararon con los enunciados equivalentes de hablantes monolingües. (...) Los resultados expresados en notación fonológica y en semitonos muestran una tendencia a un mayor ascenso tonal en hablantes de la zona precordillerana en comparación con hablantes de zonas rurales más próximas a la capital de la Región.: This paper presents preliminary outcomes of the analysis of the rising tone phenomenon found in utterances with a wide focus produced by six monolingual Spanish speakers and six native speakers of Mapudungun who have a functional command of Spanish, all of them from Región de La Araucanía in Chile. The intonational phrases of the five first minutes of conversation with native speakers were analyzed in order to describe the pitch of nuclear and postnuclear syllables. These were later compared with equivalent utterances produced by monolingual speakers. The outcomes, expressed in phonological notation and in semitones, show a tendency to a higher tone rise in speakers from the foothills of the Andes mountain range as compared with speakers from rural areas located nearer the capital of the Region. (shrink)

Ottoman Turkish.1 The shared metrical taxonomy for the four languages provided by al-Khal¯ıl’s elegant system is a convenient frame of reference, but also tends to mask major differences between their actual metrical repertoires. The biggest divide separates Arabic and Persian, but Urdu and Turkish have in their turn innovated more subtly on their Persian model.

In this article we present a qualitative analysis of empirical findings from an international project on intergroup attitudes and contact in five Central European countries specifically concerning language use. The project concentrated on the interplay of intergroup contact and perception between the members of national groups in the borderlands between the Czech Republic and Austria, Germany, Poland and Slovakia. The open statements analysed here about the contact situations and the ensuing evaluation of the Others were collected as part of an (...) online questionnaire (N=1959). After a short theoretical introduction we reveal the intertwined nature of construing language use: first in each specific borderland, then in the triads speaking together either in the native language of one of the groups (Czechs with Austrians and Germans) or with each speaking their own native languages (Czechs with Poles and Slovaks). Finally we highlight several effects we have observed as a result of being able to compare the situation in more than one neighbourhood, for instance, the effect of the different statuses of the languages involved, or the connection between the language used in contact and a feeling of proximity. (shrink)

The modern world is multicultural and multilingual, it creates difficulties for the mutual contacts of the nations with different languages. The problem of overcoming the language barrier in a multilingual world is urgent. One of the best ways to solve this problem is bilingualism: possession of two languages, a native and a second one, generally intermediate language. The choice of the intermediate language is determined by socio-political and socio-economic conditions of contacting people. In a multinational state official language (...) of the country serves as an intermediate language. In the multi-ethnic Russian Federation, Russian language chosen as the intermediate language, by which representatives of different nationalities come into contact with each other. National-Russian bilingualism in the Russian Federation has become a mass phenomenon: all non-Russian population in varying degrees is fluent in Russian language. Further improvement of bilingualism at the present stage is solved in the new format - as an active bilingualism. In an active and harmonious bilingualism, languages distribute responsibilities among themselves: native language and intermediate language perform different public functions and the number of functions is usually not equal, one language performs more functions than the other does. It depends on the status of the language: the higher the status of the language, the more reason a speaker has for its extensive use in different areas of communication. Harmonious bilingualism helps to keep the national identity of each language and makes it possible to operate each of them on an equal footing in a multicultural space. Among the many politically and legally equal languages of the Russian Federation, a special place belongs to the Russian language: it performs a consolidating function, combines the languages of the nations of Great Russia into one united family. Multilingual Russia can be compared with a starry firmament. The more bright stars we can see, the more beautiful the starry sky is. The star of the Russian language in the sky shines especially bright. (shrink)

To begin with the familiar: Piers Plowman is loaded with Latin. There are Latin verses, Latin proverbs, and quotations from the Latin Bible. There are allegorical characters like Concupiscencia Carnis, one of Fortune's daughters, whose very names are in Latin, and there are scattered Latin words and phrases. Even the structural divisions of the poem, according to manuscript rubrication, bear the Latin title passus and not the native fit.

Human linguistic phenomenon is at one and the same time an individual, social, and political fact. As such, its study should bear in mind these complex interrelations, which are produced inside the framework of the sociocultural and historical ecosystem of each human community. Understanding this phenomenon is often no easy task, due to the range of elements involved and their interrelations. The absence of valid, clearly developed paradigms adds to the problem and means that the theoretical conclusions that emerge may (...) be unclear on certain points. It is true that in the last fifty years sociolinguistic studies have advanced considerably, and today we have access to an impressive set of data and a wide variety of theoretical reflections. But as a discipline sociolinguistics does not yet have unified, powerful theoretical models able to account rigorously and clearly for the phenomena it studies. Sociolinguistic studies are today a diverse set of contributions in which certain and theoretical schools and lines of research emerged; but as is to be expected in a relatively new field, there is not enough communication between the various schools and they cannot yet be said to be integrated in terms of their conceptual and theoretical postulates. Against this background, our work aims to contribute to the overall, integrated understanding of the processes of language contact. Via an interdisciplinary, eclectic approach, it also aims to aid the theoretical grounding and integration of a unified, common sociolinguistic paradigm. Our strategy will not be merely to combine the contributions from ongoing research lines, but to address the question from a more global viewpoint which, together with the more innovative contemporary scientific disciplines, permits a harmonious integration of the various sociolinguistic perspectives in a broad, deep and unitary approach to the reality. The materials used to construct this unified approach are taken from many sources: Theoretical physics, ecology, the philosophy of science and mind, anthropology, phenomenological and process sociology, cognitive sciences, political science, pragmatics, history, systems theory, approaches to complexity and obviously sociolinguistics, are all involved in a dialogue in this desire for integration. (shrink)

In this study, we investigate the three-dot sign as a discourse marker (DM) with textual, subjective and intersubjective discourse functions. As a graphical marker that is used across languages, the three-dot sign is especially suitable for comparative studies and dynamics in language contact. Our corpus study targeting instant messages of different languages (English, German, Greek, Russian, Turkish) and speaker groups (monolinguals and bilingual heritage speakers) suggests that graphical DMs are prone to cross-linguistic influence. This depends on the specific (...) contact situation and does not seem to be a general effect of bilingualism. The societal status of a language might further influence the use of such markers in digital informal writing. Language-specific developments that relate to emerging functions indicate that functional versatility promotes frequent use of (graphical) DMs. (shrink)

The description of minority or threatened languages with a view to documenting the linguistic consequences of language contact and restriction has now emerged as a distinct area of investigation within sociolinguistics. In this book, Raymond Mougeon and Édouard Beniak present a series of analyses of the impact that contact with English on the one hand, and language-use restriction on the other, have had on the evolution of the French dialect spoken in the predominantly English-speaking province of Ontario, Canada. As (...) a background to the analyses, the authors provide sociohistorical and sociolinguistic information on the Franco-Ontarian community, and make comparisons with other varieties of French both within and outside North America. They address fundamental theoretical issues such as the interplay between linguistic and extralinguistic causes of structural change and the mechanisms of linguistic change in bilingual as opposed to unilingual speech communities. (shrink)

Despite decades of research on the reconstruction of proto-Korean-Japanese (pKJ), some scholars still reject a genetic relationship. This study addresses their doubts in a new way, interpreting comparative linguistic data within a context of material and cultural evidence, much of which has come to light only in recent years. The weaknesses of the reconstruction, according to J. Marshall Unger, are due to the early date at which pKJ split apart and to lexical material that the pre-Korean and pre-Japanese branches later (...) borrowed from different languages to their north and south, respectively. Unger shows that certain Old Japanese words must have been borrowed from Korean from the fourth century C.E., only a few centuries after the completion of the Yayoi migrations, which brought wet-field rice cultivation to Kyushu from southern Korea. That leaves too short an interval for the growth of two distinct languages by the time they resumed active contact. Hence, concludes Unger, the original separation occurred on the peninsula much earlier, prior to reliance on paddy rice and the rise of metallurgy. Non-Korean elements in ancient peninsular place names were vestiges of pre-Yayoi Japanese language, according to Unger, who questions the assumption that Korean developed exclusively from the language of Silla. He argues instead that the rulers of Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla all spoke varieties of Old Korean, which became the common language of the peninsula as their kingdoms overwhelmed its older culture and vied for dominance. Was the separation so early as to vitiate the hypothesis of a common source language? Unger responds that, while assuming non-relationship obviates difficulties of pKJ reconstruction, it fares worse than the genetic hypothesis in relation to non-linguistic findings, and fails to explain a significant number of grammatical as well as lexical similarities. Though improving the reconstruction of pKJ will be challenging, he argues, the theory of genetic relationship is still the better working hypothesis. The Role of Contact in the Origins of the Japanese and Korean Languages shows how an interdisciplinary approach can shed light on a difficult case in which the separation of two languages lies close to the time horizon of the comparative method. (shrink)

Respondents from Austria (N = 146) and the Czech Republic (N = 165) noted down their experiences with people from their neighbouring country and their attitudes to their own country and the neighbouring nation on feeling thermometers. The quantitative content analysis and qualitative critical discourse-inspired analysis of the open statements focused on the role of language in the construction of Czech-Austrian relations. Using qualitative analysis we enquired as to which themes were intertwined with the topic of language, and as to (...) the ways in which the participants perceived themselves, the Others, behind the border, and the relations between the two sides. We looked not only into what participants said but also how they said it. Using statistical analysis we tested the link between language-related topics in the descriptions of intergroup contact and the evaluation of the neighbouring nation as a whole. Throughout the article we compare the findings obtained by the two kinds of analysis and comment on (dis)agreement as well as on the (dis)advantages of both approaches. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Language Contact Series editors: Professor Suzanne Romaine, Merton College, Oxford and Dr Peter Mülhäusler, Linacre College, Oxford This series aims to make available a collection of research monographs which present case studies of language contact around the world. The series will consider factors which give rise to language contact and the consequences of such contact in a broad inter-disciplinary context. Given the prevalence of language contact in communities throughout the world, there are as yet insufficient studies to (...) permit typological generalization about the subject: this series aims to fill that gap. Bislama is the variety of Melanesian Pidgin spoken in Vanuatu. In this book Terry Crowley describes its history and development from the 1940s to the present. In the first chapters the labour history of Vanuatu is reviewed in detail in order to establish what were the contacts between speakers of various languages with one another over the period. The written record is thoroughly examined for evidence about how people communicated in the early contact period, and how the contact language developed over the time. In the later chapters the author gives a detailed treatment of selected grammatical constructions and their evolution, including syntactic developments that are currently in progress. In this discussion he addresses the controversial issue of the source of grammatical constructions in Bislama, considering in particular the possible role of substratum patterns. He concludes that while there is good evidence for substratum influence in the grammer of Bislama, the mere existence of stuctural parallels between Bislama and the substrate is not itself sufficient evidence. There are a range of other explanations that may also be drawn upon to account for these similarities. (shrink)

Throughout most of the 20th century, analytical and reductionist approaches have dominated in biological, social, and humanistic sciences, including linguistics and communication. We generally believed we could account for fundamental phenomena in invoking basic elemental units. Although the amount of knowledge generated was certainly impressive, we have also seen limitations of this approach. Discovering the sound formants of human languages, for example, has allowed us to know vital aspects of the ‘material’ plane of verbal codes, but it tells us (...) little about significant aspects of their social functions. I firmly believe, therefore, that alongside a linguistics that looks ‘inward’ there should also be a linguistics that looks ‘outward’, or one even that is constructed ‘from the outside’, a linguistics that I refer to elsewhere as ‘holistic’ though it could be identified by a different name. My current vision is to promote simultaneously the perspective that goes from the part to the whole and that which goes from the whole to the parts, i.e., both from the top down and from the bottom up. This goal is shared with other disciplines which recognize that many phenomena related to life are interwoven, self-organising, emergent and processual. Thus, we need to re-examine how we have conceived of reality, both the way we have looked at it and the images we have used to talk about it. Several approaches now grouped under the label of complexity have been elaborated towards this objective of finding new concepts and ways of thinking that better fit the complex organisation of facts and events. (shrink)

Although now largely forgotten, the international language movement was, from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War, a matter of widespread public interest, as well as a concern of numerous scientists and scholars. The primary goal was to establish a language for international communication, but in the early twentieth century an increasing accent was placed on philosophical considerations: wanted was a language better suited to the needs of modern science and rational thought. In this paper, we examine (...) the example of the English scholar C.K. Ogden's international language Basic English and his efforts to win the Vienna Circle philosophers Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap over to the project. Basic is shown to be an implementation of key ideas in Ogden's philosophy of language, ideas shared to a large extent with Neurath and Carnap. This we see through an examination of their unpublished correspondence, as well as through the collaboration that emerged between Ogden and Neurath, in which Neurath's Isotype, a system for graphically representing statistical data, became closely aligned with Basic. Through the ideas and endeavours we investigate here, we gain a new perspective on this crucial period in the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present empirical findings about language use and attitudes in intergroup contact from one of the European borderlands along the former Iron Curtain more than twenty years after it fell. The data was collected as part of an international research project Intergroup attitudes and intergroup contact in five Central European countries, which concentrates on the interplay of intergroup contact and perceptions between members of neighbouring nations in the border regions of the Czech Republic and (...) each of the neighbouring states—Slovakia, Poland, Austria and Germany. The main data collection method used is an online questionnaire with different attitude and evaluation scales, as well as a feeling thermometer of emotional relations and open statements (N=2900). In this text I use thematic and basic critical discursive analysis only on the open statements from the Czech (N=210) and German (N=152) borderlands about the situations of contact and the following evaluation of the Others. I show how the linguistic competence and also the interest in the language of the Other are distributed very unevenly; the implicit norm almost always being that the Czechs should speak German. Of course, this situation has in some cases strong emotional consequences. (shrink)

Contributions from an international team of experts revisit and update the concept of linguistic ecology in order to critically examine current theoretical approaches to language contact. Language is understood as a part of complex socio-historical-cultural systems, and interaction between the different dimensions and levels of these systems is considered to be essential for specific language forms. This book presents a uniform, abstract model of linguistic ecology based on, among other things, two concepts of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. It considers the individual (...) speaker in the specific communication situation to be the essential heuristic basis of linguistic analysis. The chapters present and employ a new, transparent and accessible contact linguistic vocabulary to aid reader comprehension, and explore a wide range of language contact situations in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific. This book will be fascinating reading for students and researchers across contact linguistics and cultural studies. (shrink)

Contact between culturally distinct human groups in the contemporary ‘glocal’ -global and local- world is much greater than at any point in history. The challenge we face is the identification of the most convenient ways to organise the coexistence of different human language groups in order that we might promote their solidarity as members of the same culturally developed biological species. Processes of economic and political integration currently in motion are seeing increasing numbers of people seeking to become polyglots. Thus, (...) English is establishing itself as the usual world supra-language, although it coexists with other lingua francas that are widely used in certain parts of the globe. All this communicative reorganization of the human species may very well pose new problems and aggravate existing tensions as regards language and identity. It would seem that these processes comprise at least four major conceptual dimensions which must be taken into account above all else, as they are both widespread and, left unaddressed, may lead to significant social instability. These dimensions concern linguistic recognition, communicability, sustainability and integration. While accepting the utility of having an inter-national language, the keystone of the system is clearly that it must ensure the linguistic sustainability of each group. The basic principle is likely to be functional subsidiarity, i.e., whatever can be done by the local language should not be done by another one which is more global. As in the quote from Paracelsus --“the dose alone makes the poison”-- contact between languages is not ‘poisonous’ per se, but when the correct dose is exceeded it can prove harmful to the language whose position is weaker. A multilingual and communicated humanity is possible. (shrink)

Williams Syndrome provides a striking test case for discourses on disability, because the characteristics associated with Williams Syndrome involve a combination of “abilities” and “disabilities”. For example, Williams Syndrome is associated with disabilities in mathematics and spatial cognition. However, Williams Syndrome individuals also tend to have a unique strength in their expressive language skills, and are socially outgoing and unselfconscious when meeting new people. Children with Williams are said to be typically unafraid of strangers and show a greater interest in (...) contact with adults than with their peers. This apparently keen social knowledge is a counterexample to the discussion of disability among academic philosophers, especially philosophers of the early modern period. Locke infamously used the example of disability to claim that Descartes’ arguments in favor of innate ideas were incorrect. On the contrary, Williams Syndrome may stand as an example of innate social knowledge; something that could benefit current discourse in philosophy, disability theory, and medical ethics. (shrink)

After entering the 20th century, great changes have taken place in the Chinese language, especially in terms of vocabulary. This change is not a simple increase in the number of words, but reflects a paradigm shift. The change involves not only nouns, but also a large number of verbs and adjectives, which this article calls “modern reconstruction of vocabulary system”. This article argues that the realization of scientific narration based on the consistency of words and texts is the fundamental motivation (...) of language modernization; the reconstruction of Chinese vocabulary system can be basically completed in a short period of time, mainly due to the language contact within the cultural circle of Chinese characters in East Asia, which is also an important driving force for the rapid two character transformation of Chinese vocabulary. This paper gives a bird’s-eye view of the nature, new concepts and new forms of lexicalization, especially the interaction between Chinese and Japanese vocabulary. (shrink)

This paper seeks to demonstrate the structural difference in communication of schizophrenia and autism. For a normal adult, spontaneous communication is nothing but the transmission of phantasía (thought) by means of perceptual objects or language. This transmission is first observed in a make-believe play of child. Husserl named this function “perceptual phantasía,” and this function presupposes as its basis the “internalized affection of contact” (which functions empirically in eye contact, body contact, or voice calling me). Regarding autism, because of the (...) innate lack of affection of contact, intersubjective perceptual phantasía does not occur spontaneously. Consequently, autistics do not engage in make-believe play but in stereotyped and solipsistic play. Without the formation of perceptual phantasía, there is no differentiation between phantasía and perception. For this reason, people with Asperger's syndrome consider conversation not an immediate communication of thought but a logical transmission of concepts. Schizophrenia is characterized by a distortion in the internalized affection of contact, resulting in a disturbance of perceptual phantasía, and this later is covered by various symptoms—for example, delusion as a pathological kind of communication of thought. This delusion is based on the pathological internalized affection of contact represented by a terrifying Other. (shrink)

This article explores strategies of cultural representation in the production of Gurinder Chadha, a British director of Sikh origin. Chadha’s work is located in what Marie Louise Pratt defines as ‘contact zones’, negotiating between US, European and Indian audiences. The result is a directing style that puts together ‘East’ and ‘West’, Bollywood and Hollywood, in an in-between space that has been radically reconfigured through hybridization. This happens in particular through her use of music and soundtrack, from the documentary I’m British (...) but..., up to the recent Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice. Here, many and diverse musical languages are put together through the representational strategies of parody and kitsch, deconstructing the idea of cultural identity in the very gesture that creates it. (shrink)

: After entering the 20th century, great changes have taken place in the Chinese language, especially in terms of vocabulary. This change is not a simple increase in the number of words, but reflects a paradigm shift. The change involves not only nouns, but also a large number of verbs and adjectives, which this article calls “modern reconstruction of vocabulary system”. This article argues that the realization of scientific narration based on the consistency of words and texts is the fundamental (...) motivation of language modernization; the reconstruction of Chinese vocabulary system can be basically completed in a short period of time, mainly due to the language contact within the cultural circle of Chinese characters in East Asia, which is also an important driving force for the rapid two character transformation of Chinese vocabulary. This paper gives a bird’s-eye view of the nature, new concepts and new forms of lexicalization, especially the interaction between Chinese and Japanese vocabulary. (shrink)

Hebrew and Arabic in Asymmetric Contact in Israel Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic 1 have existed side by side for well over a century in extremely close contact, accompanied by social and ideological tension, often conflict, between two communities: PA speakers, who turned from a majority to a minority following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and IH speakers, the contemporary majority, representing the dominant culture. The Hebrew-speaking Jewish group is heterogeneous in terms of lands of origin (...) and includes a large community of Judeo-Arabic speakers. In this paper I discuss the ‘when,’ ‘where,’ how,' and especially ‘why’ of mutual borrowing2 between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel since the 1880s.I stress that the contact is asymmetric. The majority of Hebrew speakers today do not speak Arabic. They do, however, have access to borrowed lexicon in the domain of slang and vernacular speech that both enriches these registers and provides the speakers with a feeling of being ‘indigenous’ and ‘belonging’ to the social and cultural milieu of the larger environment. In contrast, most young adult PA-speakers are bilingual. For this minority, borrowing fulfills fundamental sociolinguistic and pragmatic needs. IH lexical items have permeated all areas of professional, educational, administrative, and social activities in everyday life discourse in all styles and registers of the spoken language and, to a lesser extent, written language. They fill lexical gaps and lacunae representing modern and western concepts that did not exist in PA. They also symbolize modernism, education, and social mobility. In other words, borrowing serves as a means of ‘stepping in’ for the Jewish majority and conversely as a means for ‘stepping out and up’ for the Arab minority. (shrink)

Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible: A Lexicon of Language Contact. By Benjamin J. Noonan. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic, vol. 14. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2019. Pp. xxxv + 512. $149.95.

El que en el presente libro se confronten "lenguaje" e "historia" pretende indicar que una parte especial de los que hemos sido se hace presente como "lenguaje"; pero, además, según se analiza en sus páginas, la función del historiador tuvo, en principio, algo elemental y simple. La misma etimología de la palabra significa alguien a quien se le pide consejo sobre un hecho porque "él vio lo que pasó". Al decir lo que ve, lo que interpreta, el historiador compromete la (...) veracidad de su propio ser. Colección Clásicos - Dykinson (títulos publicados)?Serie estudios?? - Sobre la democracia ateniense. Luis Gil Fernández. - Derecho natural y dignidad humana. Ernst Bloch. - Alejo Carpentier. Poética del Mediterráneo Caribe. Inmaculada López Calahorro. - P. Szondi. Teoría del drama moderno. Ensayo sobre lo trágico. - El concepto poíesis en la filosofía griega. Emilio Lledó. - Lenguaje e historia. Emilio Lledó.?Serie textos? - Heródoto. Historia. Libro I. Ed. bilingüe de J. M. Floristán. - Sófocles. Electra. Ed. bilingüe de Luis Gil Fernández. - Platón. Fedro. Ed. bilingüe de Luis Gil Fernández. - Aristóteles. Poética. Ed. bilingüe de Paloma Ortiz García. - Horacio. Arte poética. Ed. bilingüe de Luis Gil Fernández. - Boileau. El arte poética y otras sátiras. Ed. bilingüe de Alberto Torrego Salcedo. - Lezama Lima. Escritos de Estética. Ed. de Pedro Aullón de Haro. - República poética. Textos programáticos de la literatura española (siglos XVIII y XIX). Ed. de Germán Garrido Miñambres. (shrink)

The essays in this collection focus on the essentially moral desire within humanistic inquiry to seek a point of contact between personal experience and intellectual reflection. The book is concerned with the development of a plural vocabulary of transformation that stems from the language of historians, philosophers, feminists, and aestheticians. It delineates a significant and widespread change in intellectual perspective that resists homogenizing the objects of study to abstract conceptual models and structures. What emerges from this volume are personal, responsible, (...) situated languages that engage intellectuals after the waves of abstract theory of the past twenty years. ContentsChristie McDonald and Gary Wihl/PrefaceNancy F. Partner/History Without Empiricism/Truth Without FactsJudith Schlanger/How Old Is Our Cultural Past?Isabelle Stengers/The Humor of the PresentNancy Austin/Naming the Landscape: Leisure Travel and the Demise of the SalonKarsten Harries/Beauty, Language, and Re-Presentation: Notes Toward a Critique of Aesthetics--With Special Reference to ArchitectureMary Ann Caws/Making Space: For a Poetry of ArchitectureCharles Altieri/Intentionality Without Interiority: Wittgenstein and the Dynamics of Subjective AgencyJacques Schlanger/Changing One's BeliefsRosi Braidotti/Theories of GenderSarah Westphal/Stories of GenderMary Bittner Wiseman/Three Renaissance Madonnas: Freud and the Feminine. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Logic of Proposition Predicate Logic Conclusion.

The term `code-switching' is used to describe the mixing of different language varieties which often results from language contact. This book is the first full-length study of code-switching in a European context.

This paper investigates the impact of the historical factor on language choice in Protestant Churches in Cameroon. It is based on the postulate that religious languages are more stable than their secular counterparts, not only in their forms, but also in their variety. Therefore, it was hypothesized that the first language group to come in contact with the mother mission society of a religious variety is likely to remain the major group in the church, and its language, the liturgical (...) language. To verify this hypothesis, the researcher analysed language use in three Protestant parishes located in the Yaoundé metropolis: the Oyom-Abang parishes of the Eglise Evangélique du Cameroun and Eglise Presbytérienne Camerounaise, and the Yaoundé-Melen-Philadelphie parish of the Eglise Protestante Africaine. The data were collected via participant observation and informal interviews. Their analysis revealed that the use of indigenous languages for key parts of a church service in the three parishes selected was usually associated with the place where the Church was founded, which is the area where its mother mission society first settled in the country. In that vein, the following languages were reported: Bamileke at EEC Oyom-Abang, Basaa at EPC Oyom-Abang, and Ngumba at EPA Yaoundé-Melen-Philadelphie. (shrink)

Globalization has now become an integral part of our lives. One of the basic components of globalization is the integration process that involves all areas of human life including language evolution. We consequently look at this problem in terms of language and natural language processes influenced by a complex variety of factors—both interlinguistic and extralinguistic-focusing mainly on the linguistic contacts with emphasis on areal aspects.

Fundamental to spatial knowledge in all species are the representations underlying object recognition, object search, and navigation through space. But what sets humans apart from other species is our ability to express spatial experience through language. This target article explores the language ofobjectsandplaces, asking what geometric properties are preserved in the representations underlying object nouns and spatial prepositions in English. Evidence from these two aspects of language suggests there are significant differences in the geometric richness with which objects and places (...) are encoded. When an object is named (i.e., with count nouns), detailed geometric properties – principally the object's shape (axes, solid and hollow volumes, surfaces, and parts) – are represented. In contrast, when an object plays the role of either “figure” (located object) or “ground” (reference object) in a locational expression, only very coarse geometric object properties are represented, primarily the main axes. In addition, the spatial functions encoded by spatial prepositions tend to be nonmetric and relatively coarse, for example, “containment,” “contact,” “relative distance,” and “relative direction.” These properties are representative of other languages as well. The striking differences in the way language encodes objects versus places lead us to suggest two explanations: First, there is a tendency for languages to level out geometric detail from both object and place representations. Second, a nonlinguistic disparity between the representations of “what” and “where” underlies how language represents objects and places. The language of objects and places converges with and enriches our understanding of corresponding spatial representations. (shrink)

0. Introduction The past decade has seen Cognitive Linguistics (CL) emerge as an important, exciting and promising theoretical alternative to Chomskyan approaches to the study of language. Even so, sheer numbers and institutional inertia make it the case that most current neurolinguistic research either assumes that the Chomskyan formalist story is more or less correct (and thus that the task of neurolinguistics is to determine how the brain implements GB, for instance), or that the there are two possibilities, Chomskyanism or (...) associationism/connectionism, and that the task of neurolinguistics is to discover which is really the way the brain does it. In either case, the theoretical apparatus of CL is not being explored by neurolinguistics, and hence the promise CL holds for making genuine fruitful contact with theoretical neurobiology is not materializing as quickly as one might hope. This paper is an attempt to make some initial steps at fulfilling this promise. (shrink)

This book offers insights on the study of natural language as a complex adaptive system. It discusses a new way to tackle the problem of language modeling, and provides clues on how the close relation between natural language and some biological structures can be very fruitful for science. The book examines the theoretical framework and then applies its main principles to various areas of linguistics. It discusses applications in language contact, language change, diachronic linguistics, and the potential enhancement of classical (...) approaches to historical linguistics by means of new methodologies used in physics, biology, and agent systems theory. It shows how studying language evolution and change using computational simulations enables to integrate social structures in the evolution of language, and how this can give rise to a new way to approach sociolinguistics. Finally, it explores applications for discourse analysis, semantics and cognition. (shrink)

The territorial contraction and speaker-reduction undergone by the Welsh language during the past few centuries has resulted in its categorization by many linguists as an obsolescent language. This study illustrates that, although it is undeniably showing some signs of decline, Welsh stands in marked contrast to many previously documented cases of language death. Against this backdrop of contraction a steady revitalization is taking place. Based upon extensive fieldwork in two sociolinguistically contrasting communities, this book is the first to examine the (...) position and nature of contemporary Welsh with reference to both obsolescence-related developments and changes under way in the dialects. Jones focuses on immersion education, long heralded as the saviour of the language and, by examining the variety of Welsh being produced by immersion pupils, seeks to determine whether this claim is justified, or whether such pupils are in fact 'speaking immersion'. As well as discussing the recent linguistic change shown by contemporary Welsh within the language death framework, the author examines the ways in which the language has been standardized and their repercussions for language maintenance. By way of comparison these tensions and implications are also explored with reference to the other varieties of P-Celtic, namely Breton and Cornish. Series Information: Oxford Studies in Language Contact Series Editor: Professor Suzanne Romaine, Merton College, Oxford Series ISBN: 0-19-961466-0 Series Description: Most of the world's speech communities are multilingual, and contact between languages is thus an important force in the everyday lives of most people. Studies of language contact should therefore form an integral part of work in theoretical, social, and historical linguistics. This series makes available a collection of research monographs which present case studies of language contact around the world. As well as providing an indispensable source of data for the serious researcher, it contributes significantly to theoretical developments in the field. (shrink)

The changes known as the loss of inflexions in English (11th- 15th centuries, included) were prompted with the introduction of a new mode of thinking. The mode of thinking, for the Anglo-Saxons, was a dynamic way of conceiving of things. Things were considered events happening. With the contacts of Anglo-Saxons with, first, the Romano-British; second, the introduction of Christianity; and finally with the Norman invasion, their dynamic way of thinking was confronted with the static conception of things coming from the (...) Mediterranean. The history of English from the 11th to the 15th century meant the introduction, confrontation and adoption of a new mental conception of things, the static way of conceiving of things, both modes of thinking defining the language today. (shrink)